The city of Menifee rolled out a number of experts, maps and documents to debunk sludge-related concerns before a full house at City Hall on Tuesday, with some residents walking away convinced that their city was safe to live in and others leaving as concerned as ever.

“You surrounded yourself with wonderful speakers who made sludge look like fairy dust,” said Susan Rood, a local school teacher and cancer survivor who was among than more than a dozen residents to address the City Council after a nearly three-hour public workshop. “ … I feel like you are trying to brush this away rather than deal with it. Your map is wrong.”

Rood referred to maps posted in the lobby and in council chambers showing areas where sludge -- a mixture of human, household and industrial waste treated at a sewage plant -- was applied to land in Menifee before 2004, when Riverside County began regulating the use of a class of sludge that is treated to remove 99.9 percent of infectious agents.

Three years earlier, with a number of scientists and environmental experts reporting a connection between various cancers and other health problems with sludge, the county banned Class B sludge.

Regardless, David Crohn -- an associate professor of environmental science at UC Riverside who works closely with industry professionals -- said he saw no evidence that Menifee’s history of sludge application has had an adverse effect on the land and the people who live there.

Among the reasons he said should ease residents’ concerns, is there isn’t enough application of sludge -- aka, biosolids -- to be concerned about the heavy metals it contains and the pathogens contained in the soil have died out since sludge was applied in the Menifee Valley between 1990 and 2004.

“What I can tell you is it's very, very, very unlikely that this would pose a threat,” said Crohn, who holds a doctorate and master's in biology and agricultural engineering from Cornell University.

Crohn added that it would be very hard to link sludge’s alleged affects to what a number of vocal residents have called developing cancer clusters in Menifee.

“It’s hard to separate something causing something when there’s a lot of background noise,” said Crohn, noting that 41.2 percent of people develop cancer and 12.4 percent of women contract breast cancer. “It’s very challenging. We don’t have scientific power to make that determination when there are so many things that contribute to disease.”

Either way, residents continued to call attention to the fact that Menifee hasn’t had any environmental health services since opting against a contract with the county shortly after its 2008 incorporation.

Interim City Manager Rob Johnson said those services were not needed because no one had pulled a Class A sludge application since 2004 and because Menifee’s contract with CalFire included environmental health services provided by the county in the event of hazardous spills or reports of illegal dumping of sludge.

Although police and fire officials in attendance said there have been no reports of illegal dumping called into their offices since incorporation, Councilman Tom Fuhrman suggested residents likely wouldn’t even know what they were witnessing if they saw trucks driving through a field at night applying sludge as a fertilizer to their land.

For all they knew, they could be applying manure to those fields, Fuhrman said.

“The reason it hasn’t been reported is John Q. Citizen doesn’t know what’s going on with a set of headlights in a field,” Fuhrman said. “Nobody makes a determination late at night.”

Pete Bouris, whose family farmed as much as 10,000 acres in and around the Menifee Valley, said his ranches opted against applying sludge to its fields to steer away from a controversy centered around residents’ health. He added that sludge was not applied to land that his family farmed in the J-Barr and Mapleton communities near Scott Road.

“We did not use sludge in our fields; we did use cow manure,” Bouris said. “We made a family decision against sludge because we didn’t want to deal with the complaints associated with the smell.”

He added: “We live where we farm. We’re not going to purposely harm our families.”

In addition to having John Watkins, the deputy director of the county’s Environmental Health Department, address the region’s history with sludge application, an Environmental Protection Agency consultant said the city’s development standards -- which only require secondary testing when there is historical evidence linking the land to possible contamination -- were more than acceptable.

Katie Minnear, often a speaker on this topic at council and Planning Commission meetings, joined Miller at the podium with renewed concerns that she shared during the workshop and again at the ensuing City Council meeting.

“Thank you for the contrived forum; that was really great,” Minnear said at the council meeting. “Now, I know you just want me to sit down and shut up and never talk about sludge again. And you know I’m not going to do that.”

“As a taxpayer we’ve spent enough money on this,” Lanz said. “We’re chasing ghosts. We have other needs -- not chasing ghosts and wild accusations. I think we should move on.”

Former Councilwoman Sue Kristjansson agreed that it was time to move on for the sake of the city’s reputation.

“If we have this negative connotation that this city is some toxic waste dump, it’s going to hinder our progress,” she said.

Although the City Council asked staff members to pursue having the county begin studying local health trends -- which would not be an added cost to the city, said Watkins -- Councilman Wallace Edgerton said he agreed that the community had received enough information to move on after years of dancing around Menifee’s history with sludge.

“I think I know enough that I can say I feel very comfortable in Menifee,” Edgerton said.